Mahesh Dattani: on and off stage

The first and only time I met Mahesh Dattani was as an ill-informed theatre and literary critic writing for a noted newsmagazine. I met him at a farm house not very different from the setting of his play turned into a film Mango Souffle (the theatre version was called One Muggy Night in Mumbai).

It had been raining and as I ran helter skelter into a writers' workshop I had to cover, I spilled the contents of my purse right on Dattani's lap under his very interested gaze.

As I tried to pick up my things, Dattani asked if he could see whose photographs I kept in my wallet. "I'm sorry if you think I'm intruding, but I feel one gets to know a lot about a person through what they keep in their wallets," he said.

It is in fact a search for these private niches in a character that has made Dattani a rare success in the theatre world.

Whether it be the strained relationship between detective Uma Rao and her superintendent of police husband Suresh, which gently unveils the hypocrisy of the educated middle class, or the true-to-life portrayal of abuse victims in 30 Days in September, Dattani seems to have peered into the purses of all his characters.

The collection of his plays""for the stage and the radio""and his screenplay for Morning Raga, a film directed by Dattani, give a good range of the author's many talents.

In a theatre scene shrouded by a feeling of deja vu, because of the constant recycling of old tired plays, Dattani's work had burst out like an explosion of creativity.

His ambiguous sexuality and the fact that he worked out of salubrious Bangalore instead of the "creatively fertile" Mumbai also reflect very deeply in his work.

The flavour of the city is never far from his work""especially in Morning Raga, all about a lady Carnatic singer's guilt at having cost the life of her friend because of her ambition as a singer""and is peppered with references in Kannada.

Seen as a collection, certain things do strike you almost immediately about the themes that Dattani likes to tackle. One is obviously the theme of the ambiguity of sexuality, very upfront in Mango Souffle, and the first of the Uma Rao detective series, Seven Steps Around the Fire, which deals with the shadowy world of the transvestite community.

It is less so in Dance like a Man, which talks of the gendered nature of performing arts but does not have characters who have ambiguous sexuality.

The second theme is of course the nature of the creative process, ambition, and in case the ambition is born in a woman, the accompanying social guilt thrust upon her.

Here, if one sees the collection as a developing thought, then, Dattani progressively becomes more sympathetic to his women characters in his later plays, after a fairly judgemental start in Dance Like a Man, where the female protagonist is shown as a manipulative dancer who secures her artistic freedom at the cost of her husband in a mephistophelean bargain with her father-in-law.

For example, in the Uma Rao series and even the screenplay of the movie Morning Raga, Dattani puts an honest and unpalatable spotlight on our hypocrisies with regard to a woman with ambition and her "proper place" in the world.

In the foreword to Morning Raga, actress Shabana Azmi who plays the central female character in the film, says that she disagreed with Dattani on her character showing more grief on her friend's death than on her son's in an accident.

Dattani apparently told her that it was the way he had envisaged the character. On screen, her remorse at her friend Lakhmi's accident actually translates into an anathema for her earlier ambitions of being a leading Carnatic music performer and almost prevents her from grieving her own loss till she meets Lakshmi's son, played by actor Prakash.

The violin, played by Lakshmi, is frequently used as a metaphor for failed ambition and maternal love, as is evident in notes to the script.

Dattani's work is important in understanding the stress and strain of urban India, where the certainties of village life are stifling and the uncertainties of a new order bewildering.

Here is where Dattani scores. All his plays on these themes come out looking good, while his radio play on drought in Gujarat is the only one on a different theme, lifted from the mere "good propaganda" slot.

I confess that the radio plays leave me cold, and in Dattani's defence, these appear to be commissioned plays; like Goya painting the Spanish royal family, it seems Dattani's artistic sleight of hand. The plays sound perfectly good, but lack soul somehow.

Dattani is one of our few playwrights but his monopoly rights have not, thank god, translated into predictable work. However, having said that, he needs to expand his range a little more, into more than an explorer of sexual politics.

Morning Raga is a start in that direction. He needs to find new subjects to turn his gaze on, in order to remain fresh. Dattani deserves thanks for lifting the Indian theatre scene out of the time warp of the 1970s , which was the last decade in which any new plays were written, that too very heavy political fare, pertinent to that time.

In an age where politics is a dirty word, Dattani turned the spotlight on sexual politics, maybe in 2005 a play on the post-industrial blues please!

As to the rest of the story of my only meeting with Dattani, he found my mother's photograph in my wallet along with my own and exclaimed that he too was carrying the same, without any references to a significant other.

"We are all mother-loving narcissists," he said with a naughty chuckle.

---

Collected Plays - II

Mahesh Dattani
Penguin India
Price: Rs 450;
Pages: 572